In his most haughty Etonian manner, Prime Minister Anthony Eden of Great Britain wryly conjugated a deprecating Americanized verb – ”dull, duller, Dulles”- referring to the austere Presbyterian Wall Street lawyer John Foster Dulles who became secretary of state under President Dwight Eisenhower. Yet it is with his more worldly and chillingly amoral younger sibling Allen Welch Dulles, who joined Foster as Ike’s CIA director, with which I will primarily focus. Like many in the LRC ambit, I am in the midst of reading the magisterial and utterly compelling, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, by the masterful story teller and power elite biographer David Talbot. It is a bold synthesis of forty years of my intense readings on this Machiavellian figure.

All of the dark malevolent aspects of Dulles are here for the reader to absorb and reflect upon: his privileged heritage of entitlement and elite education as one of the elect propelling him through the corridors of power of the northeastern seaboard establishment; his incredible subterfuge and treasonous relationship with the corporate, financial, and military elite hierarchy of the German National Socialist State before, during, and after the Second World War; his turning a callous and blind eye towards reports of the Holocaust while the top OSS official in Switzerland; his attempt to cut a separate deal with the Nazis while FDR ordered “unconditional surrender” and prosecution of the Nazi elite; his post-War back-stage efforts to forge a deep state intelligence successor to the OSS with himself at its helm; the CIA’s draconian MKULTRA mind control experiments; and his covert regime change operations in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, and the November 22, 1963 coup d’état in the United States.

While reading this catalog of infamy, subversion, assassination, and state-directed mayhem, it occurred to me to share with LRC readers other historical treatments of Dulles and his cloistered clandestine universe which I have on my shelves which prepared me for this synthesis. Here then, is a select bibliography:

Aldrich, Richard J. (2001). The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence;

Black, Edwin (2009). Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust;

Brown, Anthony Cave, editor (1976). The Secret War Report of the OSS;

Douglass, James W. (2010). JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters;

Herken, Gregg (2014). The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington;

Hersh, Burton (2002). The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA;

Higham, Charles (1983). Trading With the Enemy: An Expose’ of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949;

Grose, Peter (1994). Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles;

Kinzer, Stephen (2013). The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War;

Kinzer, Stephen and Schlesinger, Stephen (1982). Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala;

Kinzer, Stephen (2003). All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror;

Kinzer, Stephen (2006). Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq;

Lisagor, Nancy and Lipsius, Frank (1988).  A Law Unto Itself: The Untold Story of the Law Firm Sullivan and Cromwell;

Loftus, John; Aarons, Mark (1994). The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People;

Loftus, John and Aarons, Mark (1998). The Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and the Swiss Banks;

Loftus, John (2010). America’s Nazi Secret: An Insider’s History of How the United States Department of Justice Obstructed Congress by: Blocking Congressional Investigations into Famous American Families Who Funded Hitler, Stalin and Arab Terrorists; Lying to Congress, the GAO and the CIA about the Postwar Immigration of Eastern European Nazi War Criminals to the US; and Concealing from the 9/11 Investigators the Role of the Arab Nazi War Criminals in Recruiting Modern Middle Eastern Terrorist Groups;

Mahl, Thomas E. (1998). Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44;

Marks, John (1988). The Search For the ‘Manchurian Candidate:’ The CIA and Mind Control;

Mills, C. Wright (1959). The Power Elite;

Mosley, Leonard (1978). Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen, and John Foster Dulles and their Family Network;

Prouty, L. Fletcher (1973). The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the World;

Saunders, Frances Stonor (1999). The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters;

Simpson, Christopher (1988). Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War;

Simpson, Christopher (1993). The Splendid Blonde Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century;

Smith, Richard Harris (1972). OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency;

Stang, Alan (1968). The Actor: The True Story of John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State 1953 to 1959;

Swanson, Michael (2013). The War State: The Cold War Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex and the Power Elite, 1945-1963.

Thomas, Evan (2006). The Very Best Men: The Daring Early Years of the CIA;

Trento, Joseph John (2001). The Secret History of the CIA;

Weiner, Tim (2007). Legacy of Ashes: The History of the Central Intelligence Agency;

Wilford, Hugh (2008). The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America;

Wise, David and Ross, Thomas (1964). The Invisible Government;

Yeadon, Glenn and Hawkins, John (2008). The Nazi Hydra in America: Suppressed History of a Century.

The Best of Charles Burris